Is it possible to use an external USB drive for LINUX?
 

I want to install RedHat or Slackware on an external USB drive, but can't get either distribution to recognize the drive, much less get anything to boot from the drive.

Are there any known tricks to get this to happen?

I doubt if you can install the distros on an external. I use a 60Gb Maxtor with RH8.1 but the distro is on an internal Hdd, and the 60Gb is just for file storage. I don't think any of the distro installers natively detect USB hard disks. I may be wrong, but I know RH doesn't show the drive during partitioning as an option..Sorry..:(

Thanks,
I haven't found anything that will let me do this yet.

I was hoping it would be possible to use the external USB drive for experiments to install various Linux distributions. I don't want to go through the pain of wiping out, then re-installing Gigabytes of now (mostly) forgotten data and packages on my main drive just to find out Linux won't work with my system.

I have heard some talk of this before. It may be possible if your BIOS supports booting from a usb device. I havent actually seen it in action though. My guess is that as OEMs get rid of the floppy drives (dell being the most recent) most boards will start to support booting from a usb device.

You should check out knoppix. Its a debian based distro that fits on one cd and will boot from the cd. It auto detects all hardware. It really is great for playing around with linux and not actually installing it, or if you find that you are more comfortable with linux where ever you are.